2013: Glut of Disaster Films

If these movies appear to confirm that old saw about the appalling allure of a train crash, what does it say about us that we still cannot look away?

By CHRIS WALLACETHE NEW YORK TIMES

Things fall apart. And apparently we love to watch them go down, in 3-D.Consider this year's glut of disaster films — "World War Z," "Olympus Has Fallen," "White House Down" and "Pacific Rim" — not to mention their city-smashing superhero counterparts ("Iron Man 3," "Man of Steel") or the dystopian voids ("After Earth," "Oblivion"). Our enchantment with annihilation, be it from exotic astronomical event or mundane villainy, is powerful and kaleidoscopic. But if these movies appear to confirm that old saw about the appalling allure of a train crash, what does it say about us that we still cannot look away?It is certainly no new phenomenon. From the dawn of culture, we have been mulling cataclysm. Fueled by our fears of floods, droughts and wrathful gods in an unstable world, our great tales — from the epic of Gilgamesh to the Book of Revelation — proposed end-time stories with which to moralize on the culture. In a more recent epoch, the writers of Victorian England, fogged over with puritan fears and piqued perhaps by bursts of scientific revelations, contemplated civilization's fall to plague, beast and Martian.But while they often returned man, post-apocalypse, to a hopeful, pastoral existence, their pulp and hard sci-fi descendants — many of who had come of age during world wars and nuclear standoffs — pushed humanity right over the edge. Arthur C. Clarke, Philip K. Dick and J.G. Ballard, among others, made their hay by looking into the bleak, 20th-century abyss, and their books, to paraphrase Nietzsche, are the abyss looking back.But even if apocalyptica as a genre isn't entirely native to cinema as a medium, each has lately elevated the other into a kind of heyday. 'Tis the best of times for the worst of times, you might say. We have placed our modern anxieties inside the particle accelerator of blockbuster Hollywood with contemporary computer effects to contemplate the obliteration of the universe on the big screen. And with adept filmmakers like Guillermo del Toro in charge of the monster mash, and powerful stars like Brad Pitt wielding their clout in getting The End just so, this summer's installments have the scope and prestige of a maturing genre.Our collective claustrophobic twinge at the prospect of global overpopulation becomes, in "World War Z," a seething tide of zombies flooding the world. Fear of the unknown, of unplumbed depths, rises up to challenge us in "Pacific Rim," only to be beaten back by our determination and mechanical mastery. And every week, it seems, buildings topple in ever-more-dazzling detail, Manhattan is stomped to more fragmentary ruins and the White House more inventively attacked, as if in simulation of a terrorist threat. And still the end cometh, with Edgar Wright's "World's End" opening next month and an adaptation of Orson Scott Card's "Ender's Game" coming in the fall.Some of the reason for this new explosion of explosiveness is the ascension of the B-movie from its second-billing status during the double-feature days of golden-era Hollywood to the primary position among our cultural products. Powered in part by the staggering advances in computer-graphic imagery, effects-driven movies of all types have escaped the genre ghetto and outpaced the more human-scale character studies at the box office. And, while fantasy, sci-fi and superhero sagas have, for decades, taken over our summers, the new flattening of the Hollywood production spectrum to mega-budget franchises, remakes and roller-coaster-ride adaptations, the big smasheroos gather as far as the eye can see.But still those floods and wrathful gods seem to haunt our collective unconscious. Joseph Campbell said that "myths are public dreams," and you could say that the movie is our contemporary mythic form. In postmillennial America, at least, we have been doing a lot of dreaming about apocalypse. Beginning perhaps with the Y2K predictions of a technological catastrophe, this eschatological mood certainly did not soften with the events of Sept. 11.In the years since that day, much has been made of the use of the iconography of terror as an allusion to travesty in movies. And there has rarely been a mega-tentpole movie in the last few years that did not make explicit visual reference to falling towers. "Man of Steel," "Avengers," "Transformers: Dark of the Moon" and "Pacific Rim" are particularly egregious in this respect, suggesting a dearth of imagination among top-tier directors.But what better way, we can imagine those directors arguing, to make their messages (such as they are) searingly personal to the viewer than to evoke such recognizable forms of mayhem and flick their emotional triggers? Either way, these are the corporate myths we are sharing, blogging about and ingesting into our culture.Cinema Apocalyptica goes beyond Sept. 11 references, and no one does this disastrous dreaming so enthusiastically or quite so often as Roland Emmerich ("Independence Day," "The Day After Tomorrow," "10,000 B.C.," "2012" and now "White House Down"). Never the best, although often marvelously ambitious, Emmerich's catastrophe spectaculars depict those same fears we inherited from our ancient ancestors, pushed to Himalayan heights, then pushed over the Himalayas, as he did with a tsunami in "2012."Floods, earthquakes, alien and terrorist attacks, human-caused climate-change disaster — Emmerich has imagined, and given us images with which to imagine, a wide gamut of our deep-seated fears in high definition. Although they push the contemporary capacities of CGI (giving short shelf life to his pictures, which look dated almost as soon as they are released), his movies have the definite foam-miniature-and-laser-beams genreness of traditional, grind house B-movies. They might be arch and feature wisecracking heroes, but Emmerich's film are emblematic of others in the Armageddon canon in their seeming indifference to the people and performances providing scale for all those explosions.Which is at least part of the self-deprecating in-joke of "This Is the End," a star-studded stoner bro's spoof of the apocalypse film with a Bible school cosmology. Although it goes a short way to create the scale, texture and caliber of effects of the movie it lampoons, destruction is a secondary part of the parody. The meat of the movie is a skewering of the public personas of James Franco, Seth Rogen, Jonah Hill, Danny McBride and, hilariously, Michael Cera, all of whom play themselves.Still, for a film genre, satire is the greatest form of flattery — a response to its popularity and a sign, in the case of doom-and-gloom depictions, that we aren't taking it all so seriously. And, whether it was our safe passage through the final moments of the last baktun of the Mayan calendar or the sheer saturation of disaster films, we have now entered eschatology's parodyville. (The satire "Disaster Movie," from 2008, probably came out four years early, picking on "Hancock," for example, instead of the low-hanging fruit of Emmerich's latest.)Which is where we find the best genre satirists in film today lying in wait. The director Edgar Wright and the actors Simon Pegg and Nick Frost, who fought zombies and horror clichés in "Shaun of the Dead," will in "The World's End" turn their Douglas Adams-style irony on an army of evil robots who try to take over the world.It might be that Michael Caine, as Alfred in "The Dark Knight," was describing moviegoers, as well as the fatalistic villains they love, when he said, "Some men just want to watch the world burn." But if "This Is the End" and "The World's End" are any sign, we'll soon be watching the fire with a little wink and a smile.

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